Let me fix that sentence for you.
THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America:This is what government dependency looks like in America; parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.
Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.
To his credit one his tweets @2:22pm:
“My column on US domestic poverty acknowledges that conservatives have a point about dependency.”
This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency
Yes, the truth hurts.
Exactly what Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’ says..that it ‘creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery’.
And ‘that utopian agenda of democratic socialism leads inevitably to ‘equality in servitude and dependence on that central state’..
It’s so much easier to write about the fly-over people than the locals over in the hood.
Like they say “There’s no bigot like a lib-tard bigot”.
A strange phenomena that. Who would have imagined that if you reward people to fail – they will.
“This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire. ”
What,did you think we were just being mean? There IS a glimmer of hope,a liberal has questioned one of the tenets of his faith!
Like KevinB and dmorris, I can’t help but zero in on this sentence:
“This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency.”
Yes. It’s amazing. Pay people to behave a certain way and in all likelyhood that is how they will behave.
Good grief. I almost don’t want to knock the guy. At least he’s admitting that being “a liberal” might be an issue. He could have obfuscated it. Maybe it’s like an alchoholic admitting he has a problem or somehing.
(We all realize, of course, that it’s because the sort of people who write Big Long Meaningful Essays for the NYT actually have never met any screwed-up-poor type people outside of what’s basically an Anthropology feld-trip that they can be so fetchingly naive and clueless, right?)
This has been identified many many times. Hard to believe that it is not commonly accepted, that welfare can twist incentives.
Last time I know it was identified in a systematic way was the 1986 Forget commission. Led to a reduction in the number of weeks of ui.
Of course the Obama admin didnt learn this, or chose to ignore as their UI Bennies are 99 weeks!
This is just sad when people chane behaviour and subsume their own pride to take a government cheque.
if you reward people to fail – they will.
Posted by: Joe at December 9, 2012 9:26 PM
That would make an excellent anti-Obama or anti-Liberalism slogan!
here is one of my own ( inspired by the fact 57 % of Mexican are on welfare ),
“The welfare state, if you build it, they will come”
Clint addressed this in his film “Million Dollar Baby” when Maggie Fitzgerald bought her mother a house with her winnings. The mother refused the gift as it would have kicked her off welfare.
The dirty little secret of all “progressive” doctrine.
It is MEANT to make you dependent.
People with air conditioning, electric washers and dryers and microwave ovens (and you can bet they all have TVs) are classified as “poor” or even “desperate”? Lord love a duck, the world has gone mad!
(Mainly) from a friend who did substitute teaching up in the hills of PA: in PA and WVa, up in the hills, it is usual for fathers to break in their daughters at the age of 13 or 14.
If they live near a truck stop, the young girls will be taken down to service the truck drivers.
Some of the little places up in the hills haven’t changed much in the last 200 years.
The celts in the Appalachian hill country have always been fiercely independent people who ‘ cling to their bibles and guns and the Constitutional right to be left alone”. These people are what the pudgy pinkos call ‘rednecks’. It must irk the flaccid PC ‘educated’ crowd to have those hill folk (who should be eating coal dust and fighting foreign wars – but not smoking after a shift underground! or drinking untaxed whiskey -and paying taxes to support ‘others’ who ‘deserve’ cheques in the mail) beating the system that was invented to humiliate and break the spirit of independence of every American citizen.
This writer should foccus on the habitual ‘abusers’ of ‘free money’. Start at the top – the Fed, the Military Complex, Union heads, politicians, public servants…..
People with air conditioning, electric washers and dryers and microwave ovens (and you can bet they all have TVs) are classified as “poor” or even “desperate”? Lord love a duck, the world has gone mad!
Add ‘and you can bet they all have computers, internet and cell phones’.
In eastern PA, even in State College, very many people live in mobile homes. Even ten years ago, in supposed prosperity, this was the case.
I would say the density increases toward the old coal country, Bethlehem etc.
In some instances no doubt it is a matter of convenience. It is impossible for an outsider to say; but there is little like it in Canada.
Better keep them in banjo class though.
back in 1969 the wife of a classmate did a university sociology study based on about 200 years of welfare data in Boston. (Church provided before the state did) Successive generations stayed on welfare because it was easier and more conveniant than getting out and working for a living. Some families for over five generations.
nothing smug canadians to get uppity about
we got;
indian act
EI
welfare
ACOA
etc
nothing smug canadians to get uppity about
Posted by: puddin n pie
what comments were “smug Canadians” getting “uppity”?
I didn’t see anyone denying that a welfare state breeds dependency, regardless of national boundaries.
$689 per child per month is a pretty healthy incentive to keep the kids out of class. It’s just so wrong on so many levels.
Flat panel, Flat panel!
Full disclosure…I collected welfare while raising my 2 daughters because my paycheques didn’t cover living expenses. I worked, kids were fed, bathed and helped with homework. They learned by example and today they are strong, independent women. No welfare or deadbeat dads. And 3 healthy happy grandbabies….life is good, finally.
Makes an excellent case for the argument that “if you are on welfare or unemployment insurance or any other form of “government dole” – you cannot vote as you would be in a direct “conflict of interest”.
kelly…you are one of the examples of the benefit of welfare in a crisis, not as a lifestyle choice.
None of this is an accident. An ignorant, illiterate and independent population votes one way every time. This time, however, the bottom is going to fall out a lot of faster than the welfare cheques can be piled up.
There’s something about a millstone around the neck of people who lead children astray…
If you like this, you’ll love it as the progressives give the US that final push over the “fiscal cliff”.
So many more dependents, so much more stolen (tax) money to “invest”…. The progressive anticipation of this boon is becoming palpable.
Remember that this is a New York Times article about people in Appalachia which quotes someone who runs a literacy program that is, assumedly, losing business.
The NYT loves to regale its readers with tales of hillbilly stupidity and the literacy programmer has found a megaphone to amplify his or her yells for more funding.
The needle of my BS detector is wiggling a bit, just off the null peg.
John Lewis Hate to break your dream up , but even in Alberta we have trailer courts filled with AISH folks , welfare people .Funny how at 5:00 PM blue smoke billows from most of the homes. About half work. Just look at the welfare figures. When Ralph was Priemier he brought it down from 200,000 to a little over 12,000. This when Alberta had 3,000,000 with change for population.
don’t feed the animals:-))
Hample has the gist of this… Only a Liberal could write an article, and not see the contradictions in hos own argument, that condemns the inevitable resulting behaviour of governmemt dependancy by making this a reason to creat more… “Our political system has created a particularly robust safety net for the elderly, focused on Social Security and Medicare — because the elderly vote. This safety net has brought down the poverty rate among the elderly from about 35 percent in 1959 to under 9 percent today ( and it has created a lifetime of government dependancy and consequently jobs for life for anti-poverty activists).
Socialism kills civilizations. It has already killed Europe. Its not like the sociology “experts” haven’t already got models to work off to know what the results will be. Britain used to be the richest most prosperous, inventive place on Earth. Now, anyone with any gumption emmigrates and the locals won’t work because it pays more not to. Young girls make a career choice of being knocked up so that the state will pay them and house them, and they make a deliberate choice of not having dad around because that way they get more. The “middle class” have few to no children because they can’t afford to after paying their taxes. You then have to import people from the third world to get anyone to work even though you have massive unemployment. Do this for a couple of generations and a once strong nation is extinct and replaced by a population of Eloi and Morlocks. HG Wells was bang on, he just didn’t see that with socialism it could happen within a century.
I volunteer at a local soup kitchen which is part of the food bank. I would say that fully 80% of the “clients” have I-Pods and other devices. It’s tough to see people lined up for a free lunch and texting at the same time.Many of them leave and get into their new tricked out pick-ups with bags of free groceries. Many are Indians but there’s lots of White men too.
Welfare- The ultimate exemplification of multiculturalism. Turdeau would be proud.
Well said, Blame Crash! VERY well said.
I think that the money line was on the 2nd page. The teacher saying “The earlier we can get them, the better. It’s like building a foundation for a house.” Classic, and elegant. Portray just how inept some parents are (in this case, are paid to be) and then argue that because those individuals aren’t capable of raising their own kids, the state should raise all kids instead. When will these people learn? It was their own over-reaching arrogance that caused this particular problem in the first place, and now they want to double-down on governmental interference.
It’s not a surprise that they can’t see the underlying problem, the surprise is that one of them actually said it this early. Usually the hand-wringing statist solution comes later.
1st hand knowledge of this cottage industry. my late wife and i rescued her niece (of whom we did not know of for 13 yrs) out of a woman who’s business was taking in ‘orphaned’ kids at $625 a month – she had at least 7 on the ‘payroll’, as her housecleaners, cooks, yard men, seamstress, etc.. Plus this lady was also on the WIC program, all the kiddos getting free breakfast and lunches in the school, school supplies, clothing, etc. what a gig.
To me the biggest shame of our social safety net is that the recipients are supported at a similar level to the working-poor. So the system is causing some people to choose between working or,,,not working.
A more sensible system would reward those that choose to at least attempt to better their situation.
Sad, but as most of us here know full well that the ultimate aim of socialism is to have everyone on the public teat. That way everyone can be controlled.
Hayek had it right.
But what’s wrong with this dependancy system?
I mean, it’s been a real success story in Quebec – that province’s economy is a real model to emmulate.
Matter of fact, here in Ontario we’re so clever that we’ve taken a page from Quebec’s welfare state success story and copied it word for word (had to translate it ourselves, of course).
And once all of Dildo McDinky’s windmills and solar panels kick in and we start exporting that $.82 per kw/hr power, all of us in Ontario will be living on big fat government cheques too – but we won’t be in no mobile homes, No Sir!
Any day now….
Anyone notice that the author was proposing social programs to rescue people from the harmful effects of social programs?
We are sowing into the wind in Canada as well. The words ‘intergenerational problems’ were added to the residential schools vocabulary. This meant that individuals are not responsible for their actions and their descendants aren’t either.
Counselors regularly report that troubled First Nations children have their first sexual experiences with family members. Family members teach each other how to mainline drugs and work as prostitutes.
First Nations governments are notorious for spending on themselves while crying for money for social programs. Our supreme court has even ruled that being a first nations person means that you can be treated differently under the law.
I really can’t see much hope without talking about personal responsibility.
I think most here didn’t read as far as the second page, and are missing the sub-text.
This is not about the failure of the dependency culture, but about how the parents are irresponsible, about how the education system needs to get at the children earlier.
Expect this, and future articles like it to be used as the basis for taking children into government “care”, for appropriate education as soon as possible. It will start with the poor, but move to every child within a very few years.
Rush Limbaugh has been calling the bulk of the Democrat supporters the “Lower Informed Voters”.
Maybe that should read the “Low Information Voters”.
Kelly, above, declared that she collected welfare while working because her pay didn’t cover her expenses. Some may consider this semantics, but I don’t consider what she received “welfare” so much as an “annual income guarantee”.
The problem with most government benefit systems is they are “all or nothing”. Either you qualify for the full benefit, or you get zilch. As a result, the sort of dis-incentives the original article was about abound. Chief among these is the absolute refusal by welfare and tax authorities to recognize that it costs money to work.
The poster-girl for this was a woman back in the Harris administration (Halle? Hilley? something) who quit her job because she could get more money on welfare than she could working, on a NET basis. Sure, her job paid more than welfare, but she lived in Newmarket (where rent was relatively cheap) and worked in downtown TO. Add in the monthly cost of the GO train (paid for in after-tax dollars) of $300/month, the cost of maintaining an acceptable office wardrobe, the cost of after-school care since she couldn’t get home before 6:30 pm each night, etc., and she decided, quite rationally, that it made more economic sense to go on welfare. Certainly her income went down, but HER EXPENSES WENT DOWN BY MORE. On a net basis, she came out ahead.
Harris, IIRC, was quite supportive of the woman, and said this what was wrong with the system, that it could drive a decent, hard-working woman to just give up because the system rewards her more for doing nothing than for making the effort to get to work every day.
One possible solution is to apply corporate like tax deductions to individuals. Corporations are allowed to deduct transporation expenses to shuttle employees between job sites; why shouldn’t people be allowed to deduct the cost of going to work? Most organizations – gov’t or private sector – find a way to expense meals (some spartan, some lavish); why shouldn’t people? Corporations write off the cost of uniforms and their cleaning; why shouldn’t people?
This might require the rejiggering of tax rates (and most probably a rise), but at least it lets people account for the cost of work, and avoids the type of disincentives discussed above.
I recall NYC put forth an incentive to unwed mothers on welfare. Basically they got a premium for every month they were not preggers….the welfare rolls growth ceased immediately.
Rewards for desired behaviour work….disincentives like fines work as well.
Want less people working increase payroll taxes…that’s right, payroll taxes are in practice fines for employing people.
Whatever you reward, that’s what you get more of. Whatever you punish, that’s what you deter. Socialists reward disability, dependency, and failure, and punish success.
We must help the disadvantaged, but the trick is doing it without making things worse.
Langmann said: “Anyone notice that the author was proposing social programs to rescue people from the harmful effects of social programs?”
Yes, I did. The problem with being a Liberal is that government is the answer to all problems. When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.
I think the core, center value of Liberalism is an deep abiding lack of respect for other people. The author seems shocked that people would take their kids out of literacy classes to get money. He can’t see that literacy is of virtually no use to those people, and that they’ve made a perfectly rational choice to game the system and take the free money.
He can’t wrap his head around the truth of the matter. If the free money stops, those people really will go out and find something else to do. They won’t lie down and die, they’ll go hunting, fishing, do some farming, whatever it takes to live. And so long as there is free money, they’ll take it. Duh.
I think what he really wants is to FORCE them into living in ways that he considers respectable. To control them. Because he’s a Liberal.
Well summed up Phantom. It was bizzare. Instead of recommending better screening of children for true mental challenge issues (I think very few of us want to kick real mentally handicap kids to the street), and booting off and even punishing people gaming the system for their own benefit – he suggests further programs.
And not one realistic look at any evidence that these programs were actually working.
Useless article. Just more fodder for the elites.
Langmann, regarding kicking the disabled to the curb: I note at this time that the euthanasia movement in this country is not primarily populated with Conservatives.